The simple "study" from which these claims arose was performed by Arthur
Kellermann and Donald Reay, two medical doctors. They published the
report on their study in the June 12, 1986 New England Journal of Medicine
(NEJM), which has come now to be always ready to publish anything anti-gun. In the study they used data from medical examiner (Dr. Reay) and
police records of the gun deaths over a six year period from 1978 through 1983
in Kings County, Washington. They also interviewed investigating
officers in some cases as necessary to obtain details that were left out of
the medical examiner and police reports.

According to their NEJM abstract, their objectives were "to obtain
specific information about the circumstances, the scene of the incident, the
type of firearm involved, and the relationship of the suspect to the
victim." They did not describe the extent to which they determined
this relationshipwhether they went so far as to find out if the victim and
killer were married, family, friends, or just known to each other.

Per the abstract and their NEJM article: A total of 743 firearm-related
deaths occurred during this six-year period, 398 of which (54 percent)
supposedly occurred in the residence where the firearm was kept.
Only 2 of these 398 deaths (0.5 percent) involved an intruder (actually
burglar) shot during attempted entry. The police and Dr. Reay were
pretty certain that the purposeful killings of seven other persons (1.8
percent) were also self-defense (justifiable homicide), for a total of
nine.

There were 333 deaths called suicide, 12 that were called accidental deaths,
the nine that were called (by the police and Dr. Reay) justifiable homicide,
41 that were called nonjustifiable homicide (again, by the police and Reay),
and three that Dr. Reay could not decide whether they were suicide or
accidental. For each of the nine cases of police-characterized
self-defense homicide involving a firearm supposedly "kept in the
home," there were 1.33-1.67 accidental deaths, 4.56 police-characterized
"criminal" homicides, and 37.33 suicides "involving" (by?)
firearms.

Other than the fact that the study turns out to be nearly worthless except as
a vehicle for gun control advocates to make false claims, it appears from the
abstract that there was little if anything wrong with the study itself.
They didn't say how they determined the gun used in the killing was
"kept" in the home, so it is not possible to evaluate how well they
made this determination. But the misuse and mistatements of the
findings is where gun control advocates, including Kellermann, have
perpetrated a huge lie.

The first thing that should be kept in mind is that the study started
with a bunch of gun deaths in homes and, hence, households in which
people were killed by someone using a gun. The fact that households
where people are killed tend strongly to be nontypical (even
aberrant, disfunctional) households, and their inhabitants tend to be abnormal
and disfunctional in numerous ways, means that the results are not applicable
to people or homes in general or to all households in which
there are firearms.

We have seen unattributed info to the effect that 62% of the homicide cases were black, 52.7% of the households had a member with an arrest record, 31.3% had a
history of drug abuse, and 31.8% had a household member who had been hurt in a
family fight. These rates are far from typical of gun owners or of the
general public. It is not logical to conclude from the study that, on
average, households with guns or households in general will experience the
kind of ratio the study found.

If one could assume that the results would apply nationwide, which is not a
valid assumption, the significance would be only that, in those homes with a
gun death, the ratio of gun deaths classified as murders, suicides and
accidents by police and one specific medical examiner to those classified as
justifiable homicide by those same people would be around 43. National
statistics should yield the same ratios, if the police and medical examiner
were not biased in the Kellermann-Reay study, which is why the study was
worthless.

The second thing to keep in mind is that, because the study involved
only one county's gun deaths and only over one time span, the results cannot
be expected to be correct everywhereor even a majority of areas of similar
population densityand at all times. The study has not been replicated
by anyone in other places or times, so there is no telling how general or
universal their results are. Science normally involves researchers
repeating experiments, possibly with some refinements and corrections, or
doing completely different experiments to verify the validity of original
experiments.

The third thing to keep in mind is that the study sample size was
pretty small (398), and there were multiple measures (murder, accident,
suicide, etc.) so the sampling errors of the study would be somewhat large
(especially for the murder, accident, and self-defense categories).

The fourth thing to keep in mind about the study is that the data the
doctors were working with were classifications by a police department, not
classifications reflecting the true circumstances or even circumstances found
in court. Some of the cases probably had not been finally adjudicated
since it often takes about five years to do so.

In a very high portion of cases in which a killing is justifiable
homicide according to a later court finding, police initially report the
case as being one of murder. Some initial adjudications are also
overturned. This means that the classifications of killings would
over report murders and under report justifiable homicides (self
defense).

Because the proportion of justifiable homicides according to the study was
quite low, a small increase in that proportion by reducing the proportion of
murders would result in a large change in the ratio. Changing 4 (10%)
of the murders to justifiable homicide would change the 43:1 ratio to 30:1.

Keeping those four things in mind, let's examine some of the common
misrepresentation of the facts about this study.